Beyond the Report Card: What are the insights at the county level that we can observe?
An overall look at Academic Achievement across Californian counties
In this analysis, we define academic achievement as the difference between the Grade Cohort Standardize (GCS) Scores and NAEP standard. As a reminder of the interpretation for GCS scores, we can look at this example again: If 4th-grade students at the school of interest have a GCS value of 5.03, these students’ scores indicate a level equivalent to 5th-grade, which is about one grade level higher than the national average (the reference group) in math.
To create this map, we calculated the difference in GCS scores from the grade levels for each grade-school cohort, then aggregated them by the Californian counties. We divided the score differences into 3 categories: 1-2 years behind, Less than 1 year behind, and Less than 1 year ahead.
Looking at this map, it is clear that there is a significant difference in academic performance across various regions in California. The Bay Area and Orange County appear to outperform other counties, along with affluent tourist counties like Placer and El Dorado. However, for the remaining counties, while approximately half of them exhibit students with academic performance on par with the national average, a significant proportion of counties have students lagging behind by 1-2 years.
We recognize that there may be a huge wealth disparity among diverse communities in California. Therefore, our next step is to delve deeper into the social factors that may be contributing to what we’re observing on this map.
Further exploration into the county-level math and reasoning language arts (RLA) achievement of different student groups
Indeed, according to Cano and Hong, California faces challenging income disparities and intricate demographics that extend beyond its public education system. Since 2008, California has implemented extensive reforms aimed at allocating more resources to high-needs students and addressing educational disparities, with some success. However, despite these efforts, Black, Latino, and low-income students continue to significantly underperform compared to Asian American, white, and wealthier students in both math and reading proficiency (Ricardo Cano 2022). A UCLA research shows that Californian schools are the most segregated for Latinos, with 58% attending schools that are highly segregated. Additionally, The study also revealed that over 50% of Black students in California are concentrated in only 25 out of 1,000 school districts (Erica Frankenberg 2019).
Since we’re interested in how different socioeconomic backgrounds might influence education achievement, we looked into how students classified as economically disadvantaged according to the Californian standard perform compared to those in the non-economically disadvantaged group in terms of GCS scores. By definition, students are typically considered economically disadvantaged if they come from a low-income household or meet other criteria for poverty, such as eligibility for free or reduced-price meals, homelessness, or foster care. The criteria for California can be found here. The GCS score differences are broken down into 6 categories, ranging from being 2+ years behind to 2+ years ahead compared to the NAEP standard. The GCS categories are also divided into two disciplines, i.e. math and RLA for both economically disadvantaged and non-economically disadvantaged groups.